Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

use our own money, health, time, education, and privilege to bless them too,

To love God through suffering means learning that when we look for evidence of God’s work in our lives, it is often in the last place we’d want to find it: in weakness, in pain, in the cross. So do we have

The suffering need soothing, not just numbing. We need real hope, the kind that can carry us through the night.

Through prayer I dared to believe that God was in the midst of my chaos and pain, whatever was to come. I was reaching for a reality that was larger and more enduring than what I felt in the moment.

We often don’t know how to walk with people when the road is long and there will likely be no happy ending.

For much of history, night was simply terrifying. Roger Ekirch begins his fascinating history of nighttime by saying, “It would be difficult to exaggerate the suspicion and insecurity bred by darkness.”3 In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke said there was no other “idea so universally terrible in all times, and in all countries, as darkness.”

Our work—whether paid or not, drudgery or a joy, skilled or common—makes a difference. Done well, it adds truth, beauty, and goodness to the world. It pushes back the darkness.

In times of deep darkness, the cairns that have kept me in the way of Jesus were the prayers and practices of the church. In times of deep darkness, the

To hope is to “borrow grace.” It is not naive optimism. Hope admits the truth of our vulnerability. It does not trust God to keep all bad things from happening. But it assumes that redemption, beauty, and goodness will be there for us, whatever lies ahead.